MusicMaster Blog

By Brian Wheeler

Collaborations. It’s all the rage in music these days. Artist A with Artist B featuring Artist C and Artist D with a cameo by Artist X. Sometimes your artist fields are a who’s who of a particular genre of music. Sometimes you’ll span multiple genres with a single song! But how do you keep them all straight when it comes to scheduling? And does it matter?

Yes, most times keeping all your artists separated and governed DOES matter. It’s why the Artist Keyword field and the associated rules are so important and so commonly used. MusicMaster provides as many keywords as you’d need to fulfill even the most challenging of collaborations. Couple that with specific artist keyword separation settings for each artist and you can have complete control over the flow of your station.

But can you have too much of a good thing? Some programmers say YES. It’s possible you don’t really care that Wiz Khalifa has a cameo on a particular recording. His role in the song may be so insignificant that you don’t wish to separate this song from other Wiz tunes. Simply leave the artist keyword off the collaboration. His name can still appear in the artist name field so your jocks are aware of the contribution, but MusicMaster won’t meddle in your rotations on his behalf.

The same goes for other formats, too. As a programmer, you might not care that a Foo Fighters song plays in close proximity to a Nirvana song. Yes, Dave Grohl was in Nirvana. But you don’t care if Nirvana plays near the Foos, and neither do your listeners. So why govern it, then? Keep the Foo/Grohl keyword off the Nirvana songs and vice versa. Just because you CAN govern it, doesn’t mean you HAVE to!